Category Archives: winter

2026, Day Book, Ohio River Valley Literature, Poet's Life, poetry, prose, the no-scape, winter

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.30.26

This is the time of seeds. Of waiting and taking nourishment. There is order to the seasons. The bones know spring is coming even if the view doesn’t quite reflect it. Winter sun on the thin ravaged skin of snow and ice, dug out and dug in, still blinds. We squint, each day a brand new rapture and begin again. And again. And. Again. The roots that grow tickle and ache, an impossible to ignore arthritis. Let us then celebrate the death and life and death, make snow cream, see the muddy tracks we leave through the yard, and live. Because there is no other option. Must.

must
must
must
these aches
must
must
must
sing sing
sing sing
sing sing
must must
must again
and again
and again
must again
and 
sing
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2026, Day Book, no scape, Ohio River Valley Literature, Poet's Life, poetry, prose, the no-scape, winter

Daybook 2026 // Winter 2026 1.29.26

I’m pretty sure being in your 50’s is the Kansas of middle-age.

Hear me out. There’s still shit worth seeing, and there’s some sense of urgency or need to get on. There are mountains in the western distance, looming but never approaching. Common sense dictates that distance is finite but the mountains never seem to get any closer.

You have aches and pains, but you’ve had those since your 30’s (which is like crossing the Mississippi River between Illinois and Missouri in a jon boat with a questionable motor and no experience at rowing). There’s an indignity to having to stretch before getting out of bed. The hip you didn’t get replaced complains more about the cold and you start to feel like an old dog and you argue with the TV meteorologists because your aches give you an accurate forecast. The landscape is flat and full of either fallow fields or unharvested crops, neither of which has anything to do with you. Kansas feels like it lasts forever. There’s a few populated areas, but mostly you’re driving with who you started out with in Kentucky, or who you picked up hitchhiking along Route 66, or who picked you up while you were hitch hiking. If you were the one who got picked up, you’ve been there long enough that you take a shift driving.

The mountains loom. You think you can make out the snow trails on the peaks, but then you hit some traffic and have to take a piss and suddenly remember you left the boombox on back in 1982, somewhere around Vermont.

go
go
go
go

shovel snow

go
go
go
go

but
get
a
good
night’s 
sleep

go
go
go
go

re
mem
ber
your
vitamins

coffee
coffee
coffee

go
go
go

westward
on

mountains
exits
largely
as
a
matter
of faith

that
some
day
will fall
on your
head
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2026, Day Book, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, prose, the no-scape, winter

Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.27.26

I am trying to break the habit of allowing the algorithm to know what music I will want to listen to. This is challenging, not so much because I feel dependent on the tech, but because the algorithms do the work that FM program directors and DJs did when I was a kid. When I listen to the radio lately, I’m almost more intrigued by the songs I don’t expect and don’t especially like. It’s too easy to cater our realities. Now, and I am far less interested in a catered reality than in one that sometimes asks me to look up and see something organically new. This is a relative term, of course. The old sage sorrowed, “There is nothing new under the sun” but the old sage was also a bored monarch and hadn’t the advantage of centuries of scientific exploration. There is nothing new because everything carries the echo of something else, but over time the key signature, the tempo, and the tune changes. What is it to live in an echoless world? To be a baby. Knowledge is the acceptance of echoes, applied to every facet of living. But one must always leave a few beats open for the extraordinary improvisation. For craft and art.

it’s all a blues rift
all a deep howling
against the cold,
against the dark,
against the light,
against too little
against too much
against and for 
blues and banjo
man, blues and 
that mad jazz music
that made 
all the bigots worry 
where their wives 
got off to
while they were out
with the boys
hunting strange fruit
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